American business
In a recent letter to the Peninsula Daily News, President Donald Trump was positively differentiated from other politicians by the statement “(he) is an American businessman.”
I agree that Trump can be classified as a businessman but the letter writer failed to point out that the term can imply a wide spectrum of implications.
Specifically, Donald Trump is the type of businessman who risks other people’s money (OPM), not his own, in his financial dealings.
Evidence of this was seen after his organization filed its three major bankruptcies when it was stockholders and financial institutions, not the Trump clan, that lost money.
It was because of this type of operating that starting in the early 2000s, real American businessmen, bankers, investors, etc., would no longer loan money to Trump, and why, consequently, he had to go to Putin and the Russian oligarchs to finance his ventures, as his son Donald admitted on video in 2008.
Another example of how Trump operates his OPM strategy is when contracts his organization has signed with contractors are not honored, in the end paying them only a fraction of the contracted price.
That isn’t how real American businessmen operate.
How does Trump get away with this?
The Trump organization is awash with lawyers who will intimidate, threaten and otherwise attack anyone bold enough to sue him for breach of contract.
In my own 40 years in business I often heard people who operated like Trump referred to as “charlatans.”
Paul D. Ericksen,
Port Angeles